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After the tobacco industry's huge campaign to lie to us about the dangers of smoking, I have to wonder if other industries are doing the same. I don't know if they are - but it's hard to trust.

Do they really care - or are they just trying to protect their products?

However, “researchers have reached a consensus that this is a complex issue.” What is labeled by some as CCD is actually the result of a variety of problems, including poor bee nutrition, varroa mites, fungi and stewardship, that are impacting honey bee colonies, Kneen said.

Re: Bayer launches Bee Care Tour - smoke & mirrors?

I would have preferred that Bayer take a bolder approach to defending the neonics. Like making movies for the public to see that show that when hives are placed among vast monocultures of midwest field corn, the bees do not collect hardly any corn pollen and almost never drink guttation water and therefore are not hardly exposed to the neonics. And showing how feral colonies survive in the vicinity of corn monocultures. And showing how in the vast majority of real world field situations, corn planter dust is not a significant problem. And showing that although beekeepers in some corn belt states like Ohio tend to have above average annual losses of colonies, other corn belt states like South Dakota do not, hence the underlying health problem is not likely corn pesticide related.

The sad part of all this focus on possible pesticide effects is that it distracts attention away from much more serious and difficult to solve issues like how the high price of corn and soybeans is causing farmers to farm more conservation reserve program land, cut down shelter belts and install more drain tile so they can farm land where wildflowers currently grow. And because of our 16 trillion dollar federal deficit, it will not be possible for the taxpayers to be able to afford to pay farmers not to expand the amount of land they farm.

Whenever researchers try to acquire real world field evidence of this alledged killing, they fail to do so:
Exposure to clothianidin seed-treated canola has no long-term impact on honey bees.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17598537

So it stands to reason that even if the neonics were banned in the USA there would be no change in the annual colony mortality statistics.

for which poor conditions of coated maize seed use (PonchoProNT, the active molecule of which is clothianidin) were to blame for the acute mortality of bee colonies in around 11,500 apiaries (Rozenkranz and Wallner, 2008).

The PMRA concluded that it is highly probable that exposure to clothianidin caused the bee mortality in Ste-Martine. Even though it is not clear how the bees were exposed to clothianidin in this incident, this conclusion is supported by the fact that residues of clothianidin were found in dead bees, clothianidin is known to be highly toxic to bees and that clothianidin was not found in control bees which were collected from a healthy hive in another location.